Monthly Archives: January 2012
The Future of Customer Service and the Rise of the Social Customer
First Direct is that rarest of breeds: a well-loved British bank. And their customer service, at least in my experience, is second to none. So it makes perfect sense for them to have co-authored a report, released today in partnership with It’s Open, that discusses how customer service departments need to evolve to keep pace with the emergence of social customers.
But first, what is a Social Customer? This term describes a growing population of customers who use the web to research and make purchases, as well as seek after-sales support or advice. These customers think nothing of sharing their views on products and services and routinely recommend products to others or air grievances when a product fails to live up to expectations. These consumers have very different expectations of customer service and represent a tribe that marketers can ill afford to ignore.
Let’s look at this group in a little more depth. The It’s Open report defines them as customers who are “naturally attracted to companies that are willing to participate in a two-way dialogue,” and calls out four hallmarks of this growing tribe:
Although only a small percentage of consumers use social media to complain about brands—only 2% use Twitter, for example—their potential reach can be large.
The only scalable and sustainable way to economically deal with the growing tide of social customers is to create what some, rather ambiguously, are calling a “Social Enterprise,” not to be confused with the other type of “Social Enterprise” which applies business strategies to achieve philanthropic goals.
In our context, a Social Enterprise is one which embraces a broad range of two-way communication channels to engage in conversations with customers in order to improve service levels and the overall satisfaction of its customers. This is an entirely commercially-driven objective whose roots lie not in philanthropic goals but in a desire to maximise profits from social customers who may seek support from a multitude of channels.
The key to creating and enabling a Social Enterprise is held, without exception, by the company’s executive leadership team. It is only through the most senior leaders that the cultural change programme needed to shift decades of processes and structures can be tackled. The It’s Open report calls for boardrooms to move beyond “naive cynicism about social media” and recognise the financial benefits that an evolved customer service model can bring.
And if the boardroom holds the key to unlocking the social enterprise, it’s the middle ranking managers who, once given permission from the top, have the opportunity to ensure that a social web enabled mind-set can permeate every level of the company.
A common start point is to introduce Social CRM solutions that can help place customer services at the very heart of the enterprise. Accessible to all staff and capable of monitoring a broad, targeted spectrum of media channels, social CRM suites enable companies to listen and respond to customer voices in real time, converting prospects into buyers, buyers into advocates, and even complainants into advocates and repeat buyers:
The It’s Open report concludes with ten recommended actions for any company looking to adapt its customer service approach for our social future. It’s not an exhaustive or universally applicable list, but I encourage you to consider these steps carefully for your organisation:
- Appoint an executive team to oversee the transition to Social CRM
- Audit your social customers
- Identify relevant channels to reach these customers
- Create a multi-channel strategy for customer service
- Update staff training and communications guidelines
- Strengthen connections between customer service and key business units
- Define operational specification of social CRM
- Evaluate features and costs of shortlisted vendors
- Consultation period with chosen Social CRM vendor
- Establish metrics to assess performance
The trend is clear: few companies can afford to ignore the rise of the social customer. By making carefully planned and early changes, organisations can ensure they are well placed to cope with the channel-agnostic consumers of the future who will expect, if not demand, frictionless communication with every company that wants a slice of their spending power.
Further reading:
My Figaro Digital Conference interview
I’ll be giving a talk at Figaro Digital’s Social Media Marketing Conference on 5 April at The International Coffee Organisation in London. Tickets are now on sale here.
Ahead of this, I recently gave an interview on the current state of social media marketing, tackling questions about the ROI of social media, the most common mistakes I see companies making, and how to integrate social media into the wider marketing mix. You can read the interview here.
New videos: The CIM’s Social Media Benchmark Report
On 15 February, the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) will release the findings of its latest Social Media Benchmark study. In advance of this, I shared some thoughts with them on how I see the social media world evolving.
Find out more and book tickets to the launch event at http://www.smbenchmark.com/. And let me know if you’ll be joining me there.
Marketing Failure: Entry Deadline Extended
The cover of this week’s Marketing Week (UK) magazine screams “Entry Deadline Delayed” with the sub heading “The entry deadline [for the Engage 2012 Awards] has been extended to 31st January 2012”.
Your first response may match mine: “So what, who cares?” But, in my case at least, this quickly shifts to “Oh, so you didn’t receive enough entries to hit your income target and now you’re desperately chasing more.”
Maybe I’ve been around the marketing block a few too many times but I can think of few better ways to promote failure than with such a thinly-veiled plea for more customers to come forward.
The primary purposes most industry award programmes serve are to generate revenue for the organisers from the entry fees (for the Engage 2012 Awards that £295+VAT) and ticket sales (a tidy £2,750 plus VAT for a table of 10) and to give those in the industry an excuse to self-congratulate themselves at a back-slapping dinner in a fancy hotel they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed into.
But that doesn’t mean awards programmes are bad. Quite the opposite; without them many industries would have no outlet to promote their most talented individuals and forward-thinking organisations.
The bit that sits uncomfortably with me is seeing the marketing industry, of all industries, openly advertising the fact that it has failed to attract sufficient interest in its own awards programme by casually extending the entry deadline. All this does is:
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punish those who got their award entries in on time (their odds of winning fall with every late entry accepted)
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generate additional undeserved revenue for the awards organisers
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…and alert everyone that the awards are probably worth slightly less than the silver-plating on the trophies
So, here’s my request of all awards organisers: keep doing the sterling work you do but please, if you set a deadline, make it a deadline. Don’t move the goalposts or change the rules as you go. Plan your marketing carefully (like an award winner might), offer early bird discounts for companies that submit their entries first, and refuse to entertain late submissions.
Yes, your income stream might dry up a little and you might upset some of the lazy “we-ignore-deadlines” people, but applying some discipline and rigour will do more to inject credibility into your award brand than any amount of tail-chasing self-promotion when your own failure to plan ultimately rears its ugly head.
Sorry, you are not as influential as the Internet told you
A wise man once taught me there are just two rules in business: (1) only work with people you like and (2) never believe your own hype. And that’s not as easy as it sounds. Working with 100% nice people and remaining grounded can be tricky amidst the hyperbole that often permeates the marketing profession.
But there’s a new kid in town who’s making it harder than ever to stay grounded. Growing numbers of ordinary people I meet are being duped into believing they have more influence and power than they really hold. Thanks to services like Klout, PeerIndex and Empire Avenue, a rising tide of social media users are discovering that their online behaviour and influence are being surreptitiously tracked and measured.
Out of this monitoring comes a headline ‘Influence Score’, a comforting number that neatly encapsulates everything about your online persona into a couple of digits. That, in itself, is innocuous enough; the problem really begins when you allow “The Number” to seduce you, eventually driving you to perform unnatural acts in order to keep “The Number” happy.
Scott Cowley at BrightOak labels it “Shiny Algorithm Syndrome”, while others call them “egometrics”. There’s one thing we can all agree on: measuring influence is art, not science, and numbers alone can never explain anything as complex as a human being’s influence in the real world. And your online influence score will almost never match up with your real world influence score, if there ever were such a thing.
I’ve recently been inundated with emails from Empire Avenue, a virtual stock exchange for narcissists—my description, not theirs—that I tested when it first launched and have dabbled with since. It turns out that dozens of the site’s users have started “investing” in me, exchanging virtual currency (sometimes, worryingly, bought with real currency) to buy a conceptual stake in Allister Frost Online Persona Plc. And as my stock price rises accordingly, more people pour in to grab their slice of the action.
I have absolutely no idea what value this Empire Avenue activity serves out here in the real world. Spending time massaging your ego by boosting your “share price” and that of others seems like the social media equivalent of buying virtual fertiliser to feed imaginary rhubarb on a farm that exists in cyberspace. It’s absurd*.
And yet these same web tools, in sensible hands, might ultimately serve some useful purpose for those of us in the marketing industry. While absolute influence levels can never be measured by computer, Klout is experimenting well with its nascent Rewards programme while PeerIndex is doing interesting things helping brand managers identify and connect with “key influencers”. Savvy marketers may be able to extract value from these services if they can successfully correlate their existing customer data with that of their egometric of choice.
Just don’t fall into the trap of taking the data at face value.
So, stop worrying about growing your Klout/PeerIndex/Any-Other-Egometric score and start thinking about how you can connect with those consumers who would value having an online conversation with your brand today. Anything else could prove to be a spectacular waste of your time.
* Or maybe it’s not. If you know differently please let me know 
Image credit: Don’t believe the hype t-shirt available from http://www.spreadshirt.co.uk/.
The demise of the company man: job tenure in free-fall
The February 2012 edition of Fast Company has a fascinating article (now available online here) about the ways career patterns are shifting in our rapidly changing world. And this state of flux has profound implications for marketers, not only as they plan out their own careers, but also as they consider how to reach and maintain contact with their target consumers.
According to US data, job tenure, the length of time people stay with the same employer, is falling sharply. In 1980, 51% of men aged 35 to 64 had been in their job for longer than ten years. Fast forward twenty-five years to 2005, and that percentage had plummeted to 39%, and all the evidence points to this having fallen further since.
In fact, for US workers the median tenure in their current job is just 4.4 years, and the average number of different jobs held in a lifetime now stands at 11.4 for men and 10.6 for women. The drivers behind these changes are many and complex, but foremost are the demise of the “job for life” and increasing churn amongst younger workers.
It’s an evolution that is radically changing the way the average consumer lives their life, and has ushered in a new era of insecurity and volatility. Today’s workers have to be more open to risk, less preoccupied with long-term life planning, and more adaptable to changing circumstances. And with these new attitudes comes greater openness to trying new things, a lower tolerance of anything that doesn’t live up to expectations, and a far more intense focus on getting the most out of the here and now.
Marketers must pay close attention to these societal shifts and consider how changing attitudes may affect their ability to tap into their customer base both today and in the future. With falling job tenure comes greater geographical mobility, more rapid short-term buying decisions, and greater cultural diversity. Customer data will go out-of-date faster and business relationships will need to take on a more fluid dimension.
But above all, workers are now living very different lives to the careers of previous generations and the long-term marketing approaches that worked in the past may cease to deliver the results we expect. Today’s marketers must adapt with society or risk seeing their own careers go the same way as the job for life.
